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INTERN A TION AL
AQ Khan: The most dangerous man in the world?
On December 11 2003, a group of CIA and MI6 officers were about
to board an unmarked plane in Libya when they were handed a
stack of half a dozen brown envelopes.
The team were at the end of a clandestine mission involving
tense negotiations with Libyan officials. When they opened the
envelopes on board the plane, they found they had been given
the final piece of evidence they needed: inside were designs for a
nuclear weapon.
Those designs - as well as many of the components for an off-the-
shelf nuclear programme - had been supplied by AQ Khan, who
has just died aged 85.
Khan was one of the most significant figures in global security in
the last half-century, his story at the heart of the battle over the
world's most dangerous technology, fought between those who
have it and those who want it.
Former CIA Director George Tenet described Khan as "at least as Iran's centrifuge programme at Natanz, the source of intense
dangerous as Osama bin Laden", quite a comparison when bin global diplomacy in recent years, was built in significant part on
Laden had been behind the September 11th attacks. designs and material first supplied by AQ Khan. At one meeting
Khan's representatives basically offered a menu with a price-list
AQ Khan did not come to Europe as a nuclear spy, but he would attached from which the Iranians could order.
become one. He was working in the Netherlands in the 1970s just Khan also made more than a dozen visits to North Korea where
as his country began a renewed drive to build a bomb in the wake nuclear technology was believed to have been exchanged for
of its defeat in a 1971 war, and fearful of India's nuclear advances. expertise on missile technology.
With these deals, one of the key mysteries has always been the
Khan was working at a European company involved in building extent to which Khan was acting alone or under the orders of
centrifuges to enrich uranium. Enriched uranium can be used his government. Particularly with the North Korean deal, all the
for nuclear power or, if enriched enough, for a bomb. Khan was signs are the leadership were not just aware but closely involved.
able to simply copy the most advanced centrifuge designs and
then return home. He went on to build a clandestine network, Sometimes it was suggested that Khan was simply after
largely of European businessmen, who would supply the crucial money. It was not so simple. As well as working closely with
components. his country's leadership, he wanted to break the Western
monopoly on nuclear weapons. Why should some countries be
What made Khan so significant is what else he did. He turned allowed to keep the weapons for their security and not others,
his network outwards from import to export, becoming a globe- he questioned, criticising what he saw as Western hypocrisy. "I
trotting figure and doing deals with a range of countries, many of am not a madman or a nut," he once said. "They dislike me and
which the West considered "rogue states". accuse me of all kinds of unsubstantiated and fabricated lies
because I disturbed all their strategic plans."
@BBC @CNN International @euronews
Colombian nun kidnapped by Guatemala police free 126 From 2023, multinational
migrants from abandoned
corporations will have to
Al Qeda in Mali in 2017 is freed, container pay taxes in countries where they
operate - not just where they have
their headquarters.
